Proxy administration: A proxy for whom?

Millions of pharmaceuticals are consumed every day by millions of people around the world and yet the social practices involved remain poorly understood. We do know that much medicine taking is not ‘as the doctor prescribed’, although the underlying concept of non-compliance has long since been discredited in the pages of this journal and elsewhere (Stimson, 1974; Conrad, 1985; Donovan and Blake, 1992). [...]